I can’t believe it’s almost the end of January and I haven’t posted ONE THING to my blog. Well, it is the place that I post my workflow solutions and neat post tricks too, and lately I have been doing stuff that hasn’t been ground breaking, or hasn’t been something other than “mundane.”

Until today that is.

Today I found out a neat trick…thanks to the Twitter-verse. That’s what I love about Twitter. I can post a quick thought, or some observation…OR…I can ask quick advice about a random topic and get an answer rather quickly. I don’t have to go looking for some specific forum and then post the question there, and hope someone knows the answer. I just throw the answer out there, and wait for someone to post the solution. Typically I get more than one answer, and I get the answer within minutes.

Such was the case today, when my producer asked me if I could somehow get the shooting data from card offloads from a Canon 5D. VIDEO metadata, not photo metadata. But I guess it is the same…ASA, Shutter Speed, all that. See, we had a shoot in the AM with one videographer, and then another in the afternoon…with a different videographer. We wanted the shooting to match as much as possible, so we needed the shooting data from the frist shoot, so we could try to get the camera set up exactly the same way in the second. Only they forgot to get the shooting info from the first camera op, and couldn’t get a hold of them.

So my boss asked me, “is there any way to get the metadata from the H.264, or the THM file?”

“There must be. But I don’t know how. I opened it in TEXT EDIT, and I can see that it says ‘EOS 5D’ in the middle of all the gobbledy-gook. But I can’t see how to read the metadata.”

“Can you research that and get back to me?” my boss asks.

“Sure, I’m on it.”

So then instead of Google, I first pose the question on Twitter: “If I was handed an offload from a 5D, full card offload, is there any way I can determine what shutter speed/F-Stop was used? In the THM?” Within minutes I got several answers, including a few that mentioned ‘exiftool,’ which requires that I go into the Terminal to do things. And that is something I try to avoid as I am not a power user. Then I got this solution from @ionrae (Ryan Mast): “Or, rename the .THM file to .JPG, and Preview will open it. Can read exif data from there, too.”

OK, so I went into the Canon card structure…and located the THM files, that are along with H.264 MOV files:

And then I duplicated the THM file, and renamed the .THM to .JPG. Then I was able to open it in Preview. When I did, I got a little thumbnail:

So then I went into the INSPECTOR (CMD-I), clicked on the MORE INFO INSPECTOR tab, and then clicked on the EXIF tab. When I did that, I got this:

As you see I got a LOT of info. ISO, Lens info, Lens MODEL, ASA, Focal Length…tons of stuff. Just what I needed.

Hello there. I just found out about THM stuff in DSLR in your blog after I typed “how to set up THM file in DSLR”. Do you have any idea about my video which when I play it in my pc it won’t work because it doesn’t have any THM file on it? I really need to know if you can answer this as soon as possible because it’s important for me. Thank you in advance